ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways in which Great Expectations signals the emotions of shame and contempt and argues these emotions reveal persistent exposures that precedes the self and gives it shape. This feeling of vulnerability links the novel to a feeling of white British masculine vulnerability in the late 1850s and to the 1857 Indian uprising. Global instability led upper-middle class British men to organize Volunteer rifle corps for domestic defense, an event that fascinated the British press during the novel’s composition and publication. The Volunteer corps were portrayed as comically inept and the valiant protectors of Britain and this ambivalence also marks Pip’s ironic presentation and the novel’s interleaving of irony, shame, and contempt. The affective form of the novel captures this crisis in masculinity as a need to suspend feeling, a drive to escape feelings of vulnerability, whether to foreign threats or to social and economic precarity. By searching out suspensions of feeling and exploring what the feeling of such suspensions may be, the novel’s ambivalent conclusion culminates in a suspended emotion, an openness that suggests manifold possibilities and reserves them to Pip as a man.
